Annular Eclipse Over Bangkok

Hubble�s Mystic Mountain

Mars and a Moonbow

Star Death in 3-D

Big Bear�s Sunspot

Saturn Moon�s Jets

Hayabusa�s Fiery Return

Like a sparkling firework, much of the Japanese space probe Hayabusa disintegrates as it reenters Earth�s atmosphere on June 13. Hidden in the shower of sparks was a heat-shielded, 16-inch (40-centimeter) capsule later found to contain precious scrapings from an asteroid, which could help us understand how our planet and solar system formed.
Hayabusa is among the few spacecraft to return rock samples from space. Other such missions include the Apollo program, which retrieved moon rocks in the late 1960s and early �70s, and the comet-dust harvester Stardust, which crashed into the Utah desert at 28,900 miles (46,400 kilometers) an hour in 2006.
�Ephemeral� Lake

Patches of southern Australia�s shallow Lake Eyre seem to form a grimacing face in an August 2006 satellite picture. The picture is 1 of 40 released as part of November 2010�s Earth as Art 3 collection, the latest compilation of NASA and U.S. Geological Survey Landsat pictures chosen for their artistic quality.
Close Encounter With Lutetia

Asteroid 21 Lutetia is exposed, craters and all, in a picture captured in July by the European Space Agency�s Rosetta spacecraft. Rosetta�s close encounter with Lutetia revealed a battered world�a possible remnant from the birth of our solar system, astronomers say.
To snap the above image, Rosetta swooped about 1,965 miles (3,162 kilometers) above Lutetia�s surface. The image is the highest-resolution photo taken of the space rock, located more than 270 million miles (440 million kilometers) away from Earth, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter
Aurora Australis From Space

Even for astronauts, this May image was a rare sight indeed: an aurora hovering over the southern Indian Ocean.
Auroras occur when charged particles from the sun collide with Earth�s upper atmosphere, causing atoms of oxygen and nitrogen to gain energy and then release it in the form of light.
Gulf Oil Spill�s Spread

A satellite picture taken in April captures a small plane flying over rust-colored �streamers� of crude oil visible on the surface of the Gulf, about a week after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig sank into the Gulf of Mexico.
The extent of the spread made it more difficult for authorities to execute one of their planned strategies for containing the spill�controlled burns of the oil.
Starbirth Near the Void

Reddish puffs mark the spots where stars were recently born in a new Hubble Space Telescope picture of the dwarf spiral galaxy NGC 6503 released Monday.
The galaxy, a smaller version of our own Milky Way, sits 17 million light-years from Earth at the edge of a sparsely populated region of space called the Local Void.

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